Debbie Ford Quotes

Everyone we attract into our life is a mirror for us in certain ways. All of our relationships reflect certain parts of us. We all attract certain people into our life who have developed qualities opposite to the ones we are most identified with. In other words, they mirror our disowned selves, and we mirror theirs.

The person you call an enemy is an exaggerated aspect of your own shadow self.

When someone new comes into your life and suddenly you feel more alive, more beautiful, more sexual, more creative, more desirable and more engaged; you feel that this new person is the key to those feelings. But actually, you have these qualities too. What you don't see and don't acknowledge in yourself, you project onto someone else. Carl Jung explored this very well. He called it projection.

There's never been anything I didn't love that I didn't connect with on a personal level because, to some degree, I projected upon it.

If you're really being honest with yourself when you're acting, part of it is touching the real you. You can only separate yourself so much from the character. Those vulnerable moments do touch me.

That's where it begins and ends for me and these songs were the ones that touched me the deepest. It was like I was laying hold of some part of me that I didn't even know was there until I let it out.

I feel like everything I make is personal to me.

You can only see in someone else what you see in yourself.

I'm interested in extrovert characters, people who are doing something. But I used to only be able to photograph people I was interested in or attracted to, either psychologically or physically. That all changed when I did the 'Go Sees.'

Maybe the only thing each of us can see is our own shadow. Carl Jung called this his shadow work. He said we never see others. Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them. Shadows. Projections. Our associations. The same way old painters would sit in a tiny dark room and trace the image of what stood outside a tiny window, in the bright sunlight. The camera obscura. Not the exact image, but everything reversed or upside down.

To radiate any quality, that quality must be within yourself.

A young man rarely gets a better vision of himself than that which is reflected from a true woman's eyes; for God himself sits behind them.

My primary relationship is with myself- all others are mirrors of it. As I learn to love myself, I automatically receive the love and appreciation that I desire from others. If I am commited to myself and to living my truth, I will attract others with equal commitment. My willingness to be intimate with my own deep feelings creates the space for intimacy with another.

Anything that you resent and strongly react to in another is also in you.

The beauty you see in me is a reflection of you.

We are convinced that certain people have all the bad qualities we do not know in ourselves.

It would have been sad for me to spend my life just trying to superimpose stuff on people rather than trying to encourage them to look within themselves for what's of value.

It wasn't until I began to work on my inner life and know myself that my life changed. Success really does begin within. The size and quality of your outer life is only limited by the size and quality of your inner life.

Simply be the qualities you seek in others.

Someone who is brave enough to withdraw all his projections, [is] an individual who is conscious of a pretty thick shadow.

One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness.

I do not wish you to act from these truths; no, still and always act from your feelings; only meditate often on these truths that sometime or other they may become your feelings.

What you really have to know is one: yourself. And the only way you can know that one is in the mirror of the others. And the only way you can see into the mirror of the others is by love or its opposite—by profound emotion. Certainly not by curiosity—by dancing around asking, looking, making notes. You have to live relationships to know.

The outer world is a reflection of our inner selves.

The world is a mirror for us – whatever you say about others is really how you feel about yourself.